Many organizations have a service desk department that provides support to customers or employees. The services offered by a service desk department may vary depending whether the service desk department is inward-facing (serving workers of the organization) or outward-facing (serving outside customers of the organization), and depending on the purpose of the service desk department within its larger organization. For example, a service desk department may provide support for its organization's Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. When a worker in the organization has an issue using her computer, the worker may call the service desk department to report the issue.
The benefits of a service desk department are particularly vital to organizations such as insurance providers and financial services organizations. Such organizations may have employees at a central home office, as well as employees located in satellite offices throughout the United States and the world, and so may operate around the clock. These organizations are expected to provide a high level of service to their customers. To provide a high level of service, these organizations rely on the expertise of their service desk departments to ensure that the infrastructure supporting their employees is functional and effective.
A service desk department may use a number of different technologies to help manage and perform service desk functions. For example, a service desk department may use a call management system (CMS) to route incoming support calls to the service desk agents that work in the service desk department. A CMS may route calls based on call volume, relative business of different service desk agents, different areas of expertise of service desk agents, or other factors. A CMS may also store information related to incoming calls in a call database. The stored information may include, for example, the time of a call, the length of a call, the customer who placed the call, which service desk agent received the call, or other information.
A service desk department may also use an issue tracking system to manage workflow and keep track of reported service outages and service requests. When a user contacts the service desk department to report an issue, the agent handling the issue will open a new entry (in many systems referred to as a “ticket”) in the issue tracking system. The agent may then add additional data related to the issue to the ticket, such as the level of urgency of the issue, the users affected by the issue, or a detailed description of the issue. The ticket may then be assigned to a service desk agent to be resolved. When the assigned service desk agent performs work on the issue, the ticket is updated to reflect the agent's progress. When an issue has been resolved, the ticket may be updated to indicate that it has been resolved.
To ensure that a service desk department is performing as well as it should, technologies are required to present information about performance statistics to supervisors that manage service desk agents, as well as to the agents themselves. For example, a service level agreement (SLA) may require that a service desk department answer calls within a given period of time, or that issues must be resolved within a given period of time. It is advantageous for supervisors to be able to view data such as call answer times and issue resolution times, so that they may assess whether agents on their team are regularly meeting the SLA or not. Similarly, if agents are able to monitor their own performance, they may be able to determine areas in which they may be able to improve their work habits. Therefore, new technologies are required that effectively display service desk performance metrics for use by service desk supervisors and agents.